The Pinball Arcade

Gave these all a whirl for a little bit today. I've played Arabian Nights & Black Hole in person back in the day and Arabian is as unforgiving as ever and fast as hell. What these tables get/got right that Zen gets wrong is:

Bonuses actually count for something
You don't have to jump through fucking hoops and impossible 10x bonuses to get an extra ball. Points do that.
And, yeah, I don't have to sit there for 1.5 hours to challenge a score. I like Epic Quest, for example, but my score is at a point that it would be an hour investment to equal it and another hour to beat DirtySouth's. Not that interested in taking a score down

That being said, the ball(s) feel a little floaty on these tables. Maybe I'll have to give it more time and undo the Zen feel.

God, that Black Hole table is just as frustrating as I remember. That cheap out on the lower left and the stupid scoring system that rewards you the most for the BS upside down mode. ARGH. :)

Heh, Black Hole is a mess. I hate the crap with the ball teleporting through the flippers. That and the ball getting stuck in Ripley four times in one game. And punch the HUD interface guy in the ribs for putting the "Goal # Complete" right in front of my damn flippers.

I drew cocks all over the scoreboards. Please complete your homework and eat yer peas while I'm gone.

VACATION! AWAAAAY!

Black Hole is a Gottlieb table, so I don't know what any of you were expecting. Their tables have always been awful. :)

I haven't been playing this much yet because my gaming time is being taken up with Tales of Graces. Once that's done, the fun shall begin.

I'm looking forward to score runs on this. It should be a LOT more volatile (and fun) due to the random nature of the scoring on a lot of these tables.

Also: they finally fixed the bug on Arabian Nights. Yay!!!

Black Hole has a bug - namely, the ball goes through your flipper sometimes if the play is too fast

Really digging this, but the Magic Theatre ball seems really heavy compared to the other ones. I like the table though, but not as much as Arabian Nights. I kind of wish I'd waited for the PS3 version since it'll unlock the Vita version for free, but I've gotten enough fun out of it to justify the $10.

Both of those games were designed by John Papadiuk, and I thought TOTAN was inferior to Theater. It's obvious that the game was designed around one thing: the lamp, and the scoring depth suffers for it. Pretty much all you need to do to score highly in that game is:

Start Lightning Lamp
Make a wish and start 3X Lightning Lamp mode
Start Multiball
Profit.
Subsequent starts of Lightning Lamp increases its value, and eventually it dwarfs everything else in the game, including Multiball and the wizard mode. The regular modes are so worthless, the game gives you an option to skip them altogether without any penalty. The lamp itself is a hindrance, as random bounces can send the ball careening to an outlane, or down the middle. Not good for such an important shot. It's too bad, since I like the theme of the game. I hope Farsight releases Circus Voltaire soon, which is a much better Papadiuk designed game in my opinion.

This is why I prefer old tables ;(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DirtySouth

I hope Farsight releases Circus Voltaire soon, which is a much better Papadiuk designed game in my opinion.

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This. Since I have the Williams and Gottlieb collections, I'll wait till Voltaire comes out to hop on. I can't wait for Voltaire to come out! I have lots of good pinball memories with that table.

They're going to have to do something about the menu once they've got more than a handful of tables available. Flipping between the four current selections right now is fine, and adding some to it is no big deal, but once they've got 10 or more this just isn't going to work.

I finally got a chance to sit down with this last night and I'm completely out of practice. I had some consistently nice scores on Arabian Nights before (or at least nice by my standards) and all I could do was poke the ball around. Don't even get me started on the frustrations of Black Hole. One of the first things I did to get instant improvement, though, was to switch the flippers to the L/R buttons rather than triggers.

James